The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 118: Open to Nuance

Episode Date: May 31, 2018

Subjects Discussed: what is beer-drinking coming to?; being all tippy-toey; the new Stone Glacier tent; walking closers for black bears; taking a sharp left; the squirrel slam; freezer fossil game meat; increased hunting and fishing opportunities on our national wildlife refuges; the Maine moose conundrum; addressing the state of Alaska-NPS rule change on national reserve lands; walking through the crowd of life without pushing others; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We want the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. First thing I want to talk about, Giannis, is I thought of you yesterday because I was on the airplane.

There's a dude next to me who wants a beer but he only wants a beer like it's provisional on what beer they have okay sounds like me could do me yeah but what is the world coming to it's like like people are like i want a beer okay you decide you want a beer and that's it's like if you decide you want a beer it's like you decide you want a beer. If you decide you want a beer, it's like you decide you want a beer absent what beer is available. And then you would hone in on, now that I've decided I want this beer, which I'm going to have, I want to know what ones I can choose from. But this guy was like, I don't know if I really want a beer. It depends on what beers I can get.

And dude, that is like... That's completely normal to me. No. To me, that's no different than us driving around somewhere and you're like, man, I'd love to have a cup of coffee. I'm like, there's a Conoco right there. And you're like, yeah, you know, gas station coffee. Let's look for a Starbucks.

Let's go a little farther. You can't because he's on an airplane. He can't go look elsewhere. It would be like me waking up in the morning in a remote area with one gas station and me saying, my God, do I want a cup of coffee? And you saying the only coffee you could possibly have is from Bob's gas station. To me say like, never mind, I don't want a coffee. No way. It's like something's got to give with this beer situation.

Yeah, see for me really watered down a cup of coffee anymore there's certain breakfast joints i don't go to because they got really watered down coffee so i would just rather not have a cup of coffee rather not have one at all yeah i don't even okay come on someone please wait someone else please wait i'm in your camp yeah no the other day day, in fact, we were out in a small town in Montana. We were out specifically for bear hunting. And I was like, I want a cup of coffee. The hotel we stayed at, awful coffee.

Went to another place, awful coffee. I went to three places. Awful coffee, didn't drink any of it. Bought three cups. Not going to touch it. Yep. And the first thing I said at the third place i said can you make me a good cup of coffee he's like yeah he goes back there pours a huge tall

cup of coffee that tastes like cardboard walked out can't do it yeah i'm in that camp so if you're in a restaurant and you're like man beer sound good for dinner with dinner and then they're like the menu yeah you take a look at the menu if they're like and if all good for dinner with dinner and then they're like the menu yeah you take a look at the menu if they're like and if all they have is i don't know your you know beer choices but let's just say all they have is like the big giant macro brews and would you say yeah i'll pass and have a cocktail glass of wine or no alcohol i'll pass because they made too many of those. They made too big of a container of that beer. No, it's the flavor, bro. Carl, no, nothing.

It's so ridiculous, man. I don't know. I guess there's times where, for example, I'm thinking about working outside on a real hot day. You're painting a scene for me right now. So I'm thinking, like baling hay. You're out throwing bales, and you're sweaty and dirty, and you got hay in every crevice of your body and your clothing.

You're like, man, a brew at the end of this day would be like heaven. You know, I could go for one. Uh, in that circumstance, you pull out, like, I'm not going to name brands, but any brand, my least favorite beer, if it's cold and you're like, here you go, I'm going to, I'm going to be very grateful for that. On the flip side, there are times where it's like, I could go for a beer if there's the right beer. And if it's not there, I'm good without. So I don't have a strong opinion. I think it's more contextual. And I'd say on the airplane, you're kind of a captive audience. And depending on what kind of day you've had, maybe you're in camp a or maybe you're in camp b that is why i was reserving my contribution here okay on a somewhat related note i have

multiple times i have multiple times said that i wanted that a great name for a bar would be the wet spot turns out that a lot of guys wrote, and there are already multiple wet spots around the country. There's a wet spot bar at mile marker 69 on Highway 49 in North Dakota, and there's a wet spot bar in Texas. So I don't know what the moral of that story is. You might have to go check them out. Might have to go check them out. And just because you have a good idea and you think it was yours, oftentimes it's not. Pete Munich, can you guys talk about your new thing you're making or you guys still be all squirrely about it?

No, we can talk about a couple things. Talking about the tent? Yeah, okay, so now you can say that. Because for a long time you've been all tippy-toey. No, not the tent oh there's there's other things no we're tippy-toey about now but uh you've tiptoed you've like now tippy-toey about but you've tiptoed you're not tiptoey about how you guys are going to make a new tent correct tent is available for pre-order right now and is shipping in a month they're on on the way. So genuine stone glacier tent. That's right.

Tell me what's awesome about... When were you last on with us? Long time ago. No. No, not too long ago. A year ago with Roscoe. Because then you guys are being tiptoe-y. You were like, let's just say it might be a thing

you can put in a backpack. There's a lot of things on the drawing table right now that go in a backpack and out of a backpack oh really oh yeah do you have to be tiptoe or not um about a couple things yeah we're not we're there's a couple irons in the fire some things on the drawing board that we're not publicly talking about yet but the tent is uh is ready to go What's awesome about the tent? Strength to weight ratio. Super lightweight tent and super strong. Generously sized two-man, four-season tent.

I'm pretty sure everybody in this room spent a lot of time in a tent and being in a small one is not too much fun. So it's a generously sized, genuine two-man tent, dual vestibules, big vestibules how many pounds away four pounds four ounces minimum trail weight was it way like all in uh four pounds 12 ounces sub five pound four season tent and uh when it's all scrunched up like how big is it pretty typical looking tent stuff sack i don't know he's acting like he's holding a loaf of bread right now 18

inches long yeah big loaf of bread but there's only one of you if i was you guys i'd give one to me yeah you got you got one coming okay um but people can go on and order it right now yep do you feel that uh when you look at you like wow it's different than most tents yeah there's a couple things i really like about it um i'm six foot two most people i hunt with are tall guys too so i do genuinely like the size of the tent um there's a lot of canopy space when you sit up in it you're not crowded by nylon there's a bit of space around your head that helps with condensation and moisture it's a light color nylon i spend a lot of time in hillberg tents hillbergs are notoriously dark green nylon which can create a bit of like a dark cave vibe on day seven or like a bit of a terrarium inside there like a

hot house yep so we have white and gray nylons, which a lot of natural light comes through. Stuff I didn't think about before I was using this tent, but it actually makes a really big difference as far as just camp morale. That's a good point that I never thought of. I thought of how much the dark ones can just, like you go in there in the middle of the day to grab something, and you're like,

because what happens inside there, but I never thought about light transmission. Yeah, you spend a lot of time in a tent on some of these hunts and it's important to be comfortable in there so yeah man the length is key for uh longer people because when you get in there and your sleep bag is touching the end of that tent man you wake up with wet cold feet yeah your feet are wet and your hat's wet right so it's got a nice garage on it what do you mean vestibule yeah super big vestibules and i love them because when you're backpack hunting and you have a rifle a backpack boots vestibules are super important and having a generously sized one that all of your stuff can comfortably fit in is really nice to have yeah and not where you

cram it in there and the fabric's laying on it all correct yep do you use it last year on your sheep hunt yeah i've been using it for about a year now yep put a lot of miles on it these tents pretty pricey i'm guessing 5.95 no they're cheaper than we're not allowed to use that word it's less expensive than pete went off the competition pete went off the went wild there by saying cheap and not allowed to use a couple adjectives at stone glacier that's one of them that's a good one not to use yeah um you were just out bear hunting with a buddy of yours yeah can i can i can i can i talk i'm not gonna give away your spot but we used to do endless amounts of that. Is it fair to say you guys were out hiking closed logging roads?

Correct. And when they, on closed logging roads, we used to just walk miles. I mean, miles of those things. But it works, right? Because when they stabilize those, picture, if you will, in your mind's eye, listener, a logging road. It's like a two-track through the woods, through the mountains.

And where it switchbacks up hills, you have an erosion issue. You can have an erosion issue along some of these things. And so they grade out the banks, and they go to stabilize the banks with certain types of vegetation. And one of the types of vegetation that they stabilize a lot of the banks with is a grass called smooth brome grass. And when that comes up in the spring, it's just like what the doctor ordered for bears. They love it. You find their shits, and it just is like greasy. It's like black grease picture taking a ball of grass and then dipping it in

the thickest nastiest black grease and those are the droppings you find because when they come out of hibernation they're eating all that grass to sort of get their digestive system cleared out yeah i'm telling carl it's like it's something he doesn't know but i was like a bear biologist right am i right yeah Yeah, you are. They love that smooth-grown grass. Yeah, and we've talked about the adaptability of their diet, how they have this kind of menu that shifts over the course of the year, and that initial boost in productivity that comes with the spring

is something not unique to American black bears either. The work I did with Asiatic black bears, same kind of thing. They get that early flush of really nutrient rich spring forage in the form of veg. And for people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about bears or around bears, you kind of picture the classic bear on the stream bank eating a fish or something like that. But you don't envision a bear that's almost in like cow mode just grazing grazing grass just sitting there like a like a cow just taking mouthful after mouthful of that grass people have ideas of bears like the idea that people have of bears is like something usually

that happens to the bear now and then right yep like yes now and then that bear catches a salmon yeah what that bear does a lot of is walks through the woods eating vegetation yeah uh so the bear you got like i would say over the years we had a walking which we called walking closers probably a ratio of i bet we walked a hundred miles of closers per bear that we got, though you would know the spots that the bears used. Sure. Oftentimes it'd be like they're coming down because they're coming out of the snow

and they're coming down drainages. So you'd find concentrations of like they're following drainages down and where those drainages would have to be like a culvert going over the road and there'd be like a bunch of stabilized areas and then you'd find grass patch. And then you'd find droppings on one of those. And the next year there'd be like droppings there and there's like certain spots they go. But how many miles did you guys walk to find one bear? About half of one.

Really? Yeah, we shot. Is this right away? Yeah, we got pretty lucky that night. We hunt a lot. I hunt bears pretty much every day in bear season. And we knew knew we were going we were going to a good spot and uh we started our hike down the closed road and i was

telling you earlier that there were morels growing in the road and that was a good indicator that no one had been out there wasn't getting where was this spot again yeah it's a really good spot put it in the show notes anyways you picked picked a couple morels walking up the road i was like well nobody's been up here that's a good sign and then the scat started oh so you knew there it was just blanketed on the i mean you couldn't you couldn't walk 30 yards without finding a pile of bear scat and so you just have this feeling like're like well they're there are they're here yeah they're definitely there's definitely a bear or more within a short distance of us and yeah just came around one of the first turns in the road there it was yeah

we made a con we eventually made a like a conscious decision to stop hunting closers too boring just felt like we weren't like really learning anything weren't really learning anything and then started hunting avalanche slides and other kind of stuff yeah i would say that's my preferred method as well to hunt them in the mountains and avalanche slides and play the spot and stock game did you notice how uh oh we'll move on from that for a minute you know what i've never asked you about michelle that i did you notice how uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh

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uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh I was really young when I did this. Oh, it's a ranch. It's a brand of a ranch that kind of signified my transition out of Northern California. I left my life and my career there and was like, I want to go experience Wyoming. So I moved to Wyoming sight unseen, worked at this ranch, had an amazing. The Broken Arrow. Yeah, that was their original brand from 1902.

It was the second oldest dude ranch in the country. And it was just kind of a big uh life shift moment and it you know no why didn't you brand the brand i know right maybe um yeah no real answer for that one but yeah it's it's a little misperceived and left turn but kind of symbolic right yeah i mean i used to be super left i used to be super right wing and then i had a sharp left turn did you notice how i used the word squirrely earlier i did yeah i misused it a guy actually wrote in to clarify a point about he had a couple points he wanted to clarify two or just observations that you can feel free to comment on. One is that he says, I'm missing an important distinction

between squirrely and Western. Meaning when someone says, things got pretty Western or things got squirrely. Okay. I was arguing that there's sort of one in the same. He's saying absolutely not. He says, Western is distinct

and that it implies a sense of physical danger or even violence and squirrely lacks this says squirrely simply means movements or actions that are erratic or without obvious direction western is more sinister for example that arrow has shot he's using it in a sentence the arrow has shot squirrely ever since Giannis stepped on it. Versus things at the Dirty Shame Saloon got a little Western when Cal made a pass at that logger's girlfriend. He says, as a writer, you should know that there is a nuance here that you need to be aware of.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I think the element of the chance of physical danger is what makes things Western. If I was in a bar and the next day I said, man, things got a little squirrely in that bar, you wouldn't think that I meant, no, it doesn't really, it doesn't work. It doesn't mean that someone got-

No fight broke out. No, yeah. Just got squirrely. Another point he has is he thinks, oh, you know what? I forgot. This is Ben Long. You know Ben Long? You know Ben Long?

You know Ben Long. Mm-hmm. Ben Long also says he thinks that the use of the phrase Grand Slam beyond baseball came from a guy, like Grand Slam and hunting stuff. Like the turkey? Turkey Grand Slam. Sheep. Sheep Grand Slam. slam and hunting stuff like the turkey turkey grand slam sheep sheep grand slam um that was really the only two like really recognized no yeah really recognized but there's a deer one

they talk about the white tail grand yeah i want to start a squirrel grand slam oh i want to talk about the world's the word squirrely just real quick here because my preferred application way back on that yeah just go ahead bear with me but when you're meandering through a nice grove of oaks you might be like man looks pretty squirrely looking pretty yeah if someone says that to me i don't think that things that someone's going to come up and sucker punch me in the side of the face right i think that uh yeah just making sure we're covering the various applications of these terms could be down in the area and be like it looks very western down here meaning that it evokes the west so gransel fritz of the boone and crockett club used grant this he thinks the earliest use of grand slam for hunting boone and crockett club he used to

describe the fort to describe to killing the four varieties of north american wild sheep recognized by bnc records but which are dull sheep stone sheep rocky mountain bighorn desert bighorn um it said that he later regretted coining the phrase and ben long editorializes here and he says i think that if he were alive today he would regret it even more i don't know about that because like as a proud turkey slam holder i can never remember what kind of slam i had why can't but are you gonna say super slam holder what why do you think he would regret why is he implying he doesn't i don't know i don't know why ben i don't know why ben long feels that gransel think he would regret it why is he implying he doesn't i don't know i don't know

why ben i don't know why ben long feels that gransel fritz would regret it today he must be referring to why he regretted in the first place because i think that he feels that a guess on my part would be a guess would be that it'd be like it's like the golf if occasion of hunting there's a strong argument to be made that a lot of conservation dollars are raised for wild sheep conservation because this grand slam exists and it's something obtainable that these affluent guys can go after yeah without the grand slam i don't think there would be as much interest in collecting all four of these species and subsequently raising all this money for uh conservation yeah there's some dinky part of my

brain that knowing that um you know uh knowing that were i to go to guatemala or southern yucatan peninsula and go out in the jungle there and find an oscillated turkey, knowing that that would make me a world slam turkey holder, that idea rested my head somewhere. I was like, an added benefit would be that I would become a, I have no idea. I'm almost half joking, but I'm not. And I think that the squirrel slam is interesting because I don't think people, I think it would help promote the squirrel because I don't think people realize how many damn squirrels there

are yeah who would you include in this squirrel slam i'd put a pine squirrel in there i'd put a gray squirrel in there eastern and western with color phases yeah you know what i would put a black face black face gray squirrel in there. Eastern Western gray squirrel, black-faced. Fox. Put the fox squirrel in there. You can't put the Delmarva squirrel, right? Aberts. I'd put a Aberts in there, damn sure.

It would be all the tree squirrels. Can I ask why you wouldn't put the Delmarva? Because it's not an ESA-listed species anymore, but it's far from being... It's recovered an ESA-listed species anymore, but it's far from being, it's recovered beyond threatened, but there's not a hundred-year-old number of them yet. You know how you get a mountain goat slam? Shoot one. Mountain goat slam holder.

Got it. It's both grand, super, and world, man. That's right. He's got a question now while listening to the show oh that's cool so he's listening to the show and cooking what he describes as a freezer fossil nice word

there was some pronghorn meat that had been in the bottom of his freezer for quite some time maybe less than a decade maybe not any tips for cooking freezer fossils is there a point which freezer fossils should be discarded

there's Tips for cooking freezer fossils. Is there a point which freezer fossils should be discarded? My input on that is that's something you should really try to avoid having happen. Your brother would say no. My brother would eat it. Your brother would eat it. I would eat it. I guess if it somehow became unwrapped and it became unwrapped and then slowly just turned to like that white. Yeah. Freezer burn.

Freezer burn. And it dries out. Yeah. Just you kind of like you're it's sort of becomes sort of becomes freeze dried over time. I've had six year old elk, though, that you when we served it, you couldn't tell. It's amazing. That's one of the reasons i kind of quit putting dates i don't usually date the sucks i always remember anyways like i kind of like know what it is and how it looked and you know just like the idiosyncrasies of the marker

use and the animal i just kind of have a sense the reason i like to put dates on it is i don't like my wife always seeing the dates huh because if it's 2017 and someone says 2015, why invite the scrutiny? There's no difference. She's not going to know, but inevitably she's going to look and be like, what? Right?

That seems odd. So I don't even put dates on. I don't need to hear about it or have anyone notice about it because there's no difference anyway. So why open it up to discussion? It's like a thing that happens in marriage, I think, is you start doing little things.

You're like, it just isn't worth my time explaining it. Why even invite the question? There's nothing to hide, but why invite the scrutiny? I'm still going to keep dating mine. Yeah, there's a lot to be said. I just like it in my head to know that last year's meat's going out. New fresh meat's coming in. Yeah, but I still do the same thing.

But I do it. Here's the other thing is I have two freezers. So when it's in my garage freezer, it's on standby. It's not in the run. If it's in the kitchen freezer, then everyone that knows, everyone knows that that's what you're supposed to eat only i go down into the main freezer and i constantly move stuff into the running so i'm sort of sequencing it anyway but the minute i put dates on there people are going to go in there and they're going to see dates and shy away from dates that they feel to be outdated

good strategy You follow me? Quick news tidbit. I wonder if Carl has anything to say about this. You're talking Wyoming? Hmm? Grizzly Bears, Wyoming. I was guessing that's where you're going because that's so fresh. Okay.

No. What are you talking about? Oh, but we could talk about that. They voted on it. They did vote on it 23 tags are coming up yep 23 yeah they're still doing the one female quota though right i've got the details i can pull that up while you ask the other question no this isn't a question this is just a news thing that's interesting uh so the interior department um under secretary zinke kind of making a cool move,

where they are opening up more than 248,000 acres to hunting and fishing that were previously unavailable for hunting and fishing. So this has taken like 30 units of the National Wildlife Refuge System. Acreages in 22 states are going to be expanded to allow hunting and fishing access. So, it brings the number of refuges open to public hunting to 377, and the number of refuges available for public fishing to 312 which is cool increasing hunting and fishing opportunities in the refuge system what's interesting about that maybe it's just a it's got to be a function of the opportunities available but i was expecting

the fishing opportunity to be higher than the hunting opportunity when you started going down that path when i was talking to my brother who who's a federal, uh, who works at a federal land management agency. Yeah. He was, he, that was the first thing he brought up. It was like, how could there be, there's more open to hunting. Your bro and I are on the same wavelength. And I, and I thought, well, maybe it just has to do with like availability. The kind of land. Yeah. Especially in the dry West, you know, there's not a lot of availability, but again, you think of refuges, right. And maybe this is just a Midwesternern bias i think a waterfowl right i associate the idea of a refuge being kind of a wet well their symbol is the uh canada goose right on for the system

ah i thought or is it a swan yeah what's the bird on a michelle what's the bird on a the national wildlife refuge what's their icon it's a canada goose, right? Oh, it is? Yeah. You sure? That was a swan or something. It's one of the two. It's a long neck. It's a sweet logo. It's got a flat back.

I was just looking at it last night. Either way, hopefully they're using a good eating bird. That's a Canada goose, right? It's Canada. Mm-hmm. What's cool about the proposal right now, the status, is folks can actually weigh in on it. We actually have an article up on themediator.com. Oh, the status is folks can actually weigh in on it. We actually have an article

up on the mediator.com. Yeah, and folks can go to the link that we're linking out to, put in the docket number and voice their public support. Sweet. And I'll just give you a couple quick stats on this development in Wyoming. So if I've got it right,

Idaho also plans to have a hunt but it's for a a bear basically idaho is having a symbolic thing where they're exercising their they're exercising their management yes and montana my understanding is kind of sitting back and waiting yep knowing it's a contentious topic yeah i think that I think that they're reluctant to step into the fray. Wyoming, on the other hand. Can I act real quick? Yeah.

So I'm trying to think of how deep I want to go on this. At the time of European contact, there were, you know, you had grizzly bears ranged from i don't know like roughly the hundredth meridian maybe a little bit west of the hundredth meridian so range from portions of the great plains all the way to the pacific coast yeah uh they were, through habitat destruction, poisoning, unregulated slaughter, conflicts with sheep grazing, cattle grazing, every bad thing that can happen to a species, they were eliminated across the bulk of their range

and existed only in a few wilderness strongholds in wyoming montana um they were when the endangered species act came into play when president richard nixon signed in the signed the endangered species act into law uh the grizzly bear was listed in the lower 48 the grizzly bear is listed as an endangered species um later managers wildlife managers kind of hit on this idea that we would instead of looking at the grizzly across the entirety of its historic range we would identify distinct population segments and sort of manage bears according to these habitat pieces that could possibly hold bears because bears and humans are grizzly particularly grizzly bears and humans come into conflict and so there's a lot of areas

where we're never going to have them like Like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is grizzly bear country. We will not be able to recover grizzlies in Golden Gate Park. We will not be able to recover grizzlies in downtown San Francisco. So we look at like, where can we recover grizzlies? Where do we have populations now? We create these distinct population segments. And what later came to be is that you could declare certain population segments as recovered and remove them from Endangered Species Act protection and then shift your focus on recovering other populations that still need assistance.

So if anyone that follows the news on grizzly bears, it wasn't too long ago, the greater what's called the GYE or greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which is a chunk of land the size of Indiana, that population segment of grizzly bears were delisted because they had reached recovery objectives 12 years ago or more years ago they released they hit recovery objectives so a long time ago people look so what would it look like to recover bears in this area and we came up with ideas of how many how many females total numbers of bears all kinds of things we hit that point so then the u.s fish and wildlife service that was in charge of managing the bears recommended that the bears be delisted and handed back to state management and so now the states that have the states that are within the

gye which would be small portions of uh small portion of idaho chunk of montana pretty big chunk of wyoming now have the legal authority and legal right to manage the bears as they see fit. And they are going to, are toying with the idea, some more than others, of allowing a very limited hunting opportunities for these bears, with kind of the focus of it being focusing efforts on areas where you would be reducing conflict between the bears and livestock, but still with a recovery objective of growing bear populations in other areas so that you delist in the greater yellowstone ecosystem for instance doesn't mean anything with to do with current management practices of bears and like the cabinet yak northern cascades on and on so with all that said carl yeah you cool with all that i'm i'm cool with all that and i think you know this is one of those issues that is going to evoke strong

emotions in the non-hunting public but it really is a glowing success story when you have that transition of the management of a listed species result in the removal of said species from protection under ESA and have that management returned to the state. And it's being driven by the scientific information that justifies the decision to delist. Whether you're somebody who is A-OK with having grizzly bears hunted or not, you have to acknowledge that there's a conservation success story to be told here and also i think

a story that warrants some mourning you know the fact that we had historically so much more robust populations in such a such a massive distribution spatially you know i spent a lot of time in new mexico that's where i live now historically a lot of my favorite places in new mexico to hunt and fish were were grizzly habitat and they are not there now um whether or not they'd ever return is an interesting thing to debate and philosophize about but um personally personally i hope so yeah i share that you know i've been spending a lot of time in the gila lately i just had a great nine-day family trip chasing turkeys down in the Gila. And I was reading this book, Black Range Tales,

that covers a lot of the history of the Southwest. And it wasn't that long ago. You're talking like the 1860s, 1870s. And these miners and market hunters who were living in that country are bumping in. They call them silver tips. That was the terminology. They had this coloration, kind of the silver tip guard hairs.

And it was an animal. The conflict was very real. And it's an animal that understandably struck fear in the heart of these miners. But I share your perception about something missing from the experience when you know that animal that historically existed on the landscape is no longer there um but i also acknowledge my attitude about you know having my my wife and her friend out turkey hunting together in that landscape with grizzlies i might feel a little bit differently about it you know i understand that on their own i understand those fears and i think there's many

people who would agree that we should recover the bears and all suitable habitat the devil's in the details yeah so what is suitable most everyone i hang out with would say like yeah man i agree we should recover grizzlies and all suitable habitat. And then the minute where things would start to fall apart, what I would say is like, okay, let's all define suitable habitat. Yeah. Not in my backyard. Well, you know, but even, and this was like another surprise move, a surprise move. Interior Secretary Zinke came to Seattle and announced his support for recovering grizzly bears in the

northern cascades yeah which was surprising to me but not as surprising it probably was the cattle ranchers up there i thought it was like i'm all for it man um so i'm i'm all there's like i have like a dual pronged approach to in thinking about grizzlies i like to see grizzlies recovered in suitable habitat and once the recovery objectives are met i like to see grizzlies recovered in suitable habitat and once the recovery objectives are met i like to see them delisted and handed to state management and some people that can't get all these ideas in their heads at once but i'm playing like i'm thinking about it in the terms of i'm thinking about it in terms of like the long game where i think things should settle out and to your point this definition of of suitable habitat, I think there's a really relevant nexus here with respect to the upcoming hunts,

both in Idaho and Wyoming. Thinking about suitable habitat in the context of social acceptance and having the ability to target hunting pressure in places that are prone to conflict with the species, I think is one of those management tools that will pave the way towards social acceptance and having more places on the landscape where we can strike that balance between your kind of approach of this definition of ecological, suitable habitat, social, suitable habitat. I think hunting has the potential to be a really critical ingredient in that mix and all that of creating social acceptance because because for people who are living in these locations and whose lives are impacted by these things they're experiencing it very

differently than you are from say golden gate park totally and you're talking about the opportunity to manage in a very surgical, precise fashion, right? It's not like you're going to have a whole bunch of tags available and a bunch of people out on the landscape. You're going to be able to issue tags and target hunting pressure in a way that is very focused in places that are prone to that kind of conflict. So I think there's a real tension in a lot of these natural resources management issues between what the public would like to see in the places where they're actually directly interacting with the animal versus what the public would like to see happen from afar. ability for local managers to be able to make decisions that address the concerns of the local constituents who have to coexist with that species day in and day out, I think is one of the critical elements of being able to talk about a broader recovery beyond where they currently are and where they currently are. So that being said, here are a couple of details on the Wyoming hunt. Under the Wyoming proposal, you've got the potential for up to one female

and 10 male grizzlies killed this fall inside the state section of federally designated demographic monitoring area. So they'd have a cap at one female, 10 males. So one female, everything ends. Yep. That's right. And that's similar to other states where you have, like in New Mexico, for example, most of the units have unlimited hunting opportunity up until the quote is met. And it's the hunter's responsibility to keep tabs on where we are with respect to the total cap and also the female cap. So if either of those are reached, boom, the season closes. And then outside of that demographic monitoring area, there's the potential for another 12 grizzlies to be taken. And those could be male or female. So they're being really careful, very, very conservative hunt inside that designated portion. And then beyond that, which again,

this would be the area where the bears are starting to expand out beyond kind of that core prime habitat, i.e. the places where there's more likelihood for conflict with humans, those places you've got more flexibility. So a similar number of bears, 12 bears, but they could be male or female. So that's the plan and the season is set to start september 1st and you know again getting back to the different values that people have around wildlife um i don't see it as being unreasonable for somebody who lives far far away from montana to have some consternation about a hunt like this happening no it's not surprising to me i think there's a ton of perspectives on it that are all not surprising to me um and i think that if you're

like completely removed from it you might look and just if you're completely removed from it and you just know the bear from looking at calendars and stuff and and social media pictures and you don't you don't have like three hours to go take a look at like the history of this whole thing yeah absolutely you're gonna look and be like what yeah and that's why i think that's why i think the biggest talking point here if if people have an opportunity to communicate one thing to someone who will listen to them for 10 seconds it's that the reason these hunts are being opened up is a conservation success story. The species has rebounded, at least in this small portion of its historic range, to the point that the states are able to manage it guided by sound

population ecology, and they're going to be able to have a sustainable hunt that helps address some of these conflict concerns. But there's not anybody who works for these state agencies who's not passionate about the recovery of the species. I mean, you're not going to find a commissioner for the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish who doesn't think it's cool that grizzly bears are delisted and recovered to the point that they can have a hunt, a sustainable hunt. So I personally have a lot of admiration for the professionals that work at these state game and fish agencies. And I know based on all the personal friends that I have who work for these agencies, that they come at this work

with a really strong conservation ethic and passion for the resource so i view this this delisting and opportunity to hunt as evidence of a really cool story that i hope we can replicate elsewhere on the landscape yeah man i've spent a ton of time around grizzlies love being around them have had mix-ups with them have never killed one i'm not going to apply for one of the tags but applaud but applaud the work and effort that's gone into this and applaud the path they're taking on it and uh wishing the best of luck on it and i hope it goes well I have concerns about how this might play out, but hopefully my concerns won't be found.

And you pointed out an interesting thing. And I think this is the thing people struggle with. It's like, oh, but they're not recovered across the entirety of the range. Well, you know what? I'm sorry, but neither are elk. Elk are still absent from 90% of their historic range. But no one's running around saying like, hey, man, we don't have a healthy herd of elk in iowa

quit hunting so how in the world do you hunt them in colorado it's absurd yeah elk used to exist across like if you look at a map of the u.s it was all elk country excluding like the florida probably the florida peninsula probably parts of Maine. Elk were everywhere. We've recovered some chunks, and we hunt elk in those chunks. And we're still simultaneously trying to work to put them back on the ground in all the places that they belong. And I'll point out that the people who are doing this are hunters. New Jersey cat ladies are not doing a ton of work to

put elk back in Iowa. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that

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That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal and more as a special offer you can get a free three months

to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all right what are the kind of things you guys make compete the tent you can't it's all the rest of it's all the rest of it's all secret huh i suppose it matters when

uh when the podcast is gonna be posted um we posted. We're two to three weeks out. Give me a little hinty hint. No, we're going to rush it. Some technical performance pieces of gear that you put on your body. That touch your skin or not? It might. It touch your boots?

It might come across. It might. It might touch your boots. It just might touch your boots. Does it cover your ankles? ankles bigger than a bread box it's about a loaf of bread and it has to do with your ankles that's uh that's one of the irons in the fire okay here's something someone wrote in um i like this guy right off the bat because he says he listened to 70 episodes of the podcast in a month that's insane must do a lot of driving now he takes gripe with a number of people who've come on the podcast and i think what he's thinking about is pat durkin our good our good friend the

lovely pat durkin who argues that he draws the question like just what yeah okay he says how pat durkin who he doesn't name by name is always saying that coyotes don't kill many deer i think what pat was is saying is that coyotes are probably not having a very dramatic impact on total deer numbers right i think he's saying they don't kill deer but i think he's saying like when you look at deer numbers so like numbers of adult deer on the ground um that coyotes don't seem to be having as dramatic of an impact on deer numbers as some people like to claim but this guy goes on to have some pretty compelling anecdotal evidence where he says he has like he knows about a couple coyote dens he mounts some

trail cams on these coyote dens he's got two trail cams posted up over two different coyote dens and last year alone he caught images of coyotes dragging in 39 different fawns so he's having a hard time believing um he's having a hard time reconciling that with the idea that they're not impacting local populations i feel like it'd be nice to have pat here to kind of defend whatever it is he did or didn't say and i would not ordinarily speak for pat durkin but i will speak for pat durkin and saying he certainly did not say he doesn't think coyotes kill some deer um the coyotes in like studies out of pennsylvania yeah coyotes and domestic dogs are the number one killers of fawn mortality number one fawn mortality

is coyotes and dogs and the reason you have to say that is because when you do a necropsy do you say necropsy or necropsy person say necropsy when you do a necropsy it's hard to tell the difference yeah it's hard to tell if it was killed by a domestic dog or a coyote. Yeah, and coyotes, I mean, Pat, everybody at this table would agree, coyotes certainly do kill a fair number of fawns, and a whole lot of other critters do. I mean, in the upper Midwest, this guy was from Minnesota. Do I have that right? Let me look here.

Does he say where he's from? I had it in my head that he was up on the Canadian border. I'm imagining, like, boundary-wise. Yeah, he's northern Minnesota he's up on the Canadian border. I'm imagining like boundary-wise. Yeah, he's in northern Minnesota, 90 miles from the Canadian border. Okay, so yeah. Black bears are going to be killing a bunch of fawns too in that country. But a couple points I would make. One is, you know, this is a species, the white-tailed deer is a species that has adapted to withstand very strong

predation pressure on fawns that occurs in a very short period of time. So there's this idea of predator swamping. And that's a reason why the deer hunting up in that neck of the woods, probably in late October, early November for a couple of weeks is really, really good because all those does are in estrus and all being bred at the same time. That translates into a very narrow window of maybe a couple of weeks, the same kind of duration of time that the rut would last would be the amount of time that all those pregnancies would be coming to parturition, to birth. And so you have a landscape that suddenly has a whole lot of food on it for a very short window of time. And everything is eating those fawns.

Coyotes are eating them. I mean, one interesting question would be, I'm not doubting this guy's story, but if you've got trail cams providing pictures of coyotes going to a den with fawns, how he arrived at the count of the number of fawns he's actually seeing versus pieces of fawns being carried around you know how you come to like there was 39 fawns through a series of static pictures i believe the guy though that there's a bunch of fawns getting dragged back the point is you're talking about an animal that has evolved to flood the market with lots of offspring.

Predator swamping. Predator swamping. It's the exact same thing that oak trees do when they mast every few years, right? They're just dumping tons of acorns out all at the same time. And the predator in this case would be something like squirrels. Or deer. Or deer. Or deer. And the driver there would be that over the long haul,

those oak trees or that deer herd is able to support a relatively small base of predators by occasionally flooding the market with offspring as opposed to trickling out acorns or fawns over a longer window of time. Yeah, to put it in an extreme sort of scenario is imagine you have, let's say you have an enclosure, right? Just a picture like the idea of Predator Swamp. You have an enclosure, and in this enclosure, you put a black bear and you put 10 white-tailed does.

And the does, all 10 of those does all dropped their fawns on the same day. And they're going to be vulnerable to predation for 48 hours. That black bear is going to eat one or two in that 48 hour window. And the other eight are going to be by that point up and running around. Now picture that those doves came in and they spread it out so that one had a baby every two weeks probably all those fawns will be dead yeah exactly so it's just in this predator swapping is something that takes place with like bird nesting colonies yep yeah so having having those those carnivores consuming some fawns is part of the system. Another interesting question for the guy would be, how has his deer hunting been? Has he been able to fill his tags?

Is he seeing deer? Sounds like a guy who's paying attention to the local landscape. My guess is he's probably on the upper end of the distribution tail in terms of hunter success rates he's curious he's active in the outdoor so he's probably a good hunter yeah um but here there's another thing too that you got to get into with this is uh there's there's the idea of like carrying capacity so how many adult deer can the landscape support? And oftentimes you're going to wind up with a somewhat, I mean, there's all kinds of variabilities and things are happening in mass crops and weather and all this stuff. But you're going to have sort of a sense that the area can support X number of deer through

the winter. And if, and that number is going to stay relatively fixed. And you could be losing tons of fawns to coyotes, but still finding that at the end of their most vulnerable stretch of time, so that every year in March or every year in April, you're going to have that same number of deer have made it through the winter. And that when these fawns are getting killed, it's just making room for the next one.

Because they're going to find, the bottleneck that they're going to pass through, is they're going to pass through a bottleneck, usually like whitetails in northern climates are passing through a bottleneck in the late winter. And only a certain number are going to fit through that bottleneck anyway. That's right.

And there's usually disproportionate mortality for those young of the year, right? So those are the ones that typically have less likelihood of passing through that bottleneck. And the ecological term you're touching on is the idea of compensatory mortality versus additive mortality so the idea that if a fawn is killed by a coyote in the summer that would have otherwise made it through the winter there's potential for that to be an additive source of mortality but if you say the coyote wasn't there, you had, let me back up. I'll simplify it. You've got 10 fawns. Okay. And only five of those fawns are going to make it through that bottleneck you're talking about late in the winter. So there's enough resources for five of them to survive and you have no coyotes in the system. So you have five of the 10 that die as a result of hardship in the wintertime.

If you have coyotes there that kill those five during the summertime and the other five make it through the harsh times of late winter, you would say that that source of mortality, the five that went to the coyotes, was compensated for. had higher survival 100 of the remaining individuals those five individuals made it through winter as opposed to only 50 of those individuals making it through

winter so there's all kinds of things that kill fawns um the fact that they've evolved with these predators the coyotes and others, and have these reproductive strategies. And another form of defense they have is the fact, as you touched on, it's not a long window of time that they're super susceptible to being killed by coyotes. It's a matter of a couple of days that they're able to run and be up on their feet. Super susceptible. of a couple of days that they're able to run and be up on their feet. Super success, super success. What's the word? Super susceptible.

Like when you're out hunting morels and you find a fawn. Just laying there. Yeah, like a pile of meat. You stumbled across it in a very narrow window of time. Yeah, and when that's the case, I mean, everything on the landscape is fat and happy. The bears are doing really well for that narrow window of time. But there aren't too many places that come to my mind where, you know, as a biologist, I'm thinking, man, I'm really concerned about a lack of abundance in white-tailed deer. likes to see deer when they're out there hunting but recognizing there's going to be some predation on the landscape and the fact that this guy gets to see that on his trail cameras you know I'd be fascinated looking at the pictures and think cool to see the coyotes doing their thing hopefully I'm

still seeing some some deer in the fall my guess is this guy is if he's in a situation where the coyotes are able to capture that many fawns from that small area, chances are there's a heck of a lot of deer kicking out fawns. So it doesn't sound like a situation where the whitetail numbers are something anybody should be really worried about. Carl, your seat just broke. It did, man. That chair just broke off from me. Yeah, the leg just cracked.

I was going to roll through it, man, just play it cool. You all right? Yeah, uh all right yeah i'm good i'm good pete say you work at a place called stone glacier i do hold on i got i got a little follow-up on this before we jump back to uh pestering pete oh just i'm not getting the kind of answers out of them that i want to get out of them but go ahead talking about this brings up this thing that i hear a lot in our community about. And it seems like hunters are kind of talking about out of both sides of their mouth on this one. Because one Instagram post is hunters are such a big part of controlling these populations.

So there's not too many deer and not too many elk. Yeah, that's a good point. And we're like the ones that are keeping all this in check and then out of the other side of their mouth it's that's why we got to kill all the wolves and coyotes because if we don't manage that population they're going to kill off all the deer that we're also managing yeah so you don't mean to tell me that there's some hunters who have some squirrely justification some squirrely justification yeah just say you like to go out and hunt a bunch um and yeah i like to hunt a bunch and i hope that there's like maintains like good stable huntable populations

of animals out there yeah totally that is funny that you're like no man we gotta hunt deer because they'll be overpopulated and we gotta kill coyotes because they're killing deer. Yeah, totally. And the only reason I bring it up is because I just think that argument is full of holes. And so if you're also of the group that is saying like, oh my God, hunting is dying right now. It's not good to be going out there with arguments that don't really hold up. That's right. I've been following some Australian hunters. And they got a whole other weird thing they're always doing or they're always saying like um hey man this is all non-native

we need to kill all these animals because they're non-native and we're doing a great service to the you know the biota of australia by killing all these non-native animals. But then they're like, damn, do I love these animals. This is all we eat. I hunt all the time. Love being out in the wild with these animals. But man, we got to kill all these animals. Or they always shoot, they're like, it's big males. So they're shooting like stags and bucks.

Because we got to control the animals. Like if you want to control the animals, I don't know if you've taken wildlife biology 101 yet. Shoot the females. Right. If that's really what this is about, shoot females. It doesn't do any good for anything in terms of number control to kill males. And people are smart, man. You've got to be, be i think authentic in these conversations

there's there's nothing wrong in my opinion with really liking to hunt and having it be motivated by a desire to be outside getting good food all that kind of stuff but if you're just trying to argue points that are all full of holes somebody who has no affiliation with hunting or the outdoors is going to pretty easily start picking at this idea of talking on both sides your mouth and i think you know it's a really good observation you made janice with respect to the predator control versus the key role of hunters if you were to pull every hunter in America and say, hey man, if we could snap our fingers right now and have the full cast of predators back on the landscape and have these systems function with natural predator prey dynamics, no need for human beings to be part of that equation anymore. It's going to be wolves and bears and lions and coyotes,

bobcats doing all that work for us we can wipe our hands we're good to go how many hunters are gonna be like oh yeah all right that's cool i don't think any of them yeah right i was only doing it to make sure everything was gonna be okay i actually hate hunt i actually hate hunting but i was just very worried about too many deer so this is there's nothing wrong with saying this is something that we deeply enjoy and we identify fundamentally in our personal identities as being hunters and people who are connected to the land and participatory. And I would make the argument too that if you want to talk about the full cast

of North American predators or global predators that for many many years homo sapiens have been part of that cast of characters and celebrating that point and this desire to maintain a connection to who we are fundamentally in our species identity i think is a much stronger case than saying well we've got this job to do and, you know, we got to, we got to make sure there aren't too many deer and oh yeah, we got to make sure there aren't too many predators. It's like, no man, celebrate the fact that we are maintaining a strong personal connection to the land, a personal connection to our identity, the species that we evolved as, which is one of that,, which is one of the key species in that

cast of predators, and be able to share authentic stories and authentic information about what we do and not try to paint it with some inauthentic brush. Because you have to give credit to the people with whom we're communicating about this stuff. They're going to be perceptive. They're going to be able to poke holes. And if you're in a thoughtful conversation, my hope would be people are eager to question and pick and ask. And I think a lot of our community of hunters, we point to these kind of tired um overused justifications that we maybe haven't put as much thought into and it's absolutely okay to really enjoy hunting and have that be a primary motivation and not feel like you have to talk about it as this well we got this job to do in the ecosystem because i think

frankly that's one of the weakest arguments that we have yeah but I think it's helpful to point out, though, to focus on your particular love of the natural world, your love of being outdoors. It could be your love of hunting for food that you feed to your family, your interactions. And it's helpful to point out and say, and

in addition to all of that, the system that we've developed in this country makes it that my participation in these activities is enormously productive in terms of land management and funding for wildlife work. Yes. It's a valuable thing to point out. It is. a valuable thing to point out it is it's not that i don't think anyone's gonna say like i'd have a hard time if someone said dude the only reason i hunt is because when i buy a hunting license that provides the funding for my state fish and game agency to work on disease issues and enforcement of wildlife regulations and land enhancement projects that's why i'm out there

because if that was the case you just send the money you just send them a check right so i think it's like there's what i personally like about this and you can take pride in the fact that the systems that we've developed over time make it that my participation in the activity is actually productive for the land and the animals there's not a problem there's no problem with that at all what i what i think what i think shines through though when you have somebody making a justification like Yanni was talking about, where you're saying simultaneously, I need to be able to play a role in helping control the whitetail deer herd, for example. And then meanwhile, yeah, we've got these issues with too many coyotes. If we don't manage the coyote numbers, we're not going to have any deer to hunt.

That kind of a conversation where holes can be poked, I think that's coming from a place of, and this might frustrate some listeners, I apologize, but thoughtful discourse here. It's a selfish kind of mindset right like i want to have deer on the landscape so that i as a hunter can get a deer it's coming from a place of i'm totally comfortable egocentrism okay yeah but okay but my argument is i don't have a problem with that my argument was saying like no i want there to be deer because i like to hunt deer yeah let me

finish my my point though because i i i like getting a deer as much as the next guy but i'm also interested in having that resource available to support other species on the landscape that have evolved there to be part of that system yeah so for me i'm digging i want to have deer on the landscape because i like to get a deer i mean if there there has not been a year in a long time and this is not some braggadocio about my hunting prowess i'm not the greatest hunter in the world but i have a steady i appreciate the kind words i have a steady supply of hard-earned game meat in my freezer like all of us here at the table do. And that's a fundamental element of my identity. If you took that away from me, that would be a major impact to me and my family in terms of our

lifestyle, how we eat. So I like having a deer as much as the next guy. But I would submit to you that on an equal level of appreciation in my mind with my own use of that resource, I value the fact that that deer herd exists and is supporting a whole cast of other awesome animals in that trophic web, that food web. Yes. So I, this is the selfishness that I was touching on. It's not saying I have a problem with somebody saying they really want to get a deer. What I have a problem with is somebody saying, I feel like I have the corner on the market for deer and these deer are all here for human beings. And I don't have any tolerance for all these other animals in the landscape that are also working hard to transfer those deer into their calories. So I love the idea

of sharing my deer hunting spots with the full cast of species that evolved to be part of that system. And if you gave me the choice of hunting in a place where I could easily kill a deer every year in the absence of that sharing, or in other words, it would be that competition, versus a place where maybe I'd kill a deer every other year, but there's this robust community of all these other organisms that depend on each other for their existence, I would take the latter option. And I think the extreme example of the ease of killing something every year and the total control. You could talk about like a high fence deer kind of operation where there's no predators, very high likelihood of success and increasingly artificial. Yeah.

I'm looking for a situation where you're experiencing the ecosystem and its full complement of species. And if that comes with potential for a lower degree of success in my hunting, so be it because I would rather have an intact ecosystem in which I can be an active participant, maybe with a lower success rate than a situation where there's a whole pile of deer out there and I'm going to get two bucks and four does every year without a whole lot of work

because the system has been so manipulated that that opportunity exists. I think that's the thing we've touched on in the past. I think that's why I kind of like caution people against assessing the health of a landscape by looking at how many deer I have, how many turkeys I have, because you could go into a property, go into a chunk of ground and scrub it of its biodiversity and scrub it of like, you know, Leopold's cogs and wheels, right, of the natural world, scrub it all out and you got like the right ratio of soybeans to multiflora rows you know to blow down timber and have a ton of deer and all other you've gotten rid of all other native much of the other native fauna and flora and you go out like look it's healthy because there's deer here it's like you

could be looking at a very unhealthy landscape that's got a shitload of deer on it and just has another way to measure it so i agree like there's nothing you're saying that i think even like borders on like a controversial sentiment i don't know man i feel like there's an element of our community of hunters that is um overly focused on simple measures of what success looks like. Did I get a deer? Did I not get a deer? As opposed to being more considerate's an element of our community that's fairly self-centered and selfish and the idea of scrubbing every predator from the landscape so that they could have more deer which has been something that the hunting community has wrestled with yeah for 100 plus years um i think that's still

alive and well in some quarters. And for me personally, I'm speaking, you know, about my own philosophy here. I think it's, I think it's flawed and I think it's detrimental to our ability to have thoughtful conversations with the non-hunting public about the activity when it's coming from a really selfish place. If you're saying, and this is getting back to Yanni's observation about, you know, I'm playing this role as a deer manager, I'm playing this role as a predator manager, I think what starts to come through there is just this idea that the deer are here for me, as opposed to I'm a participant in this system that I treasure, that I cherish, and that I know something about, that's a very different conversation. And I think that conversation

about being an active participant in a community that you know something about, and by community, I mean an ecological community where you're a predator involved in this system that you've come to understand and appreciate and cherish, that kind of conversation I think can resonate, should resonate with a whole lot of people who might never want to hunt. And the days of us, you know, arguing about this stuff from a position of feeling like we've got these really strong rights, you know, we exist in a democratic society, and I think our ability to continue participating in these activities, maybe not in our generation, but maybe in our grandkids' generation, it's going to hinge on whether or not we can communicate authentically and effectively.

And that conversation about being an active participant who's immersed in the systems that evolved us as a species, I think that's an argument. That's a set of observations that's going to continue to resonate with the non-hunting and hunting public in perpetuity. Whereas a conversation about, I need to manage the deer so they don't get overabundant. I need to manage the coyotes so they don't eat all my deer. That conversation is going to fall flat on its face yeah i'm tracking i'd like to point out too very quickly that you know hunting the animals that we take as hunters are compensatory right yes and in most for you know unless they're really trying

to knock down a population of said you know certain animal where they're all Unless they're really trying to knock down a population of said certain animal, where all of a sudden they're like, okay, kill a bunch of those, kill a bunch of this. Most of these systems we manage so that we're not doing extra killing. If you took us out, you'd roughly have the same population. It's not quite that simple. Not quite that simple. Not quite that simple. I mean, what drives the establishment of quotas is going to be a combination of ecological science and social science. The reality is in any one of these systems, we could be managing it up or down potentially for more or fewer animals. And it's a matter of, yeah, making sure it's sustainable,

but you could have a sustainable number of animals on the landscape that is higher or lower than what we do. So not all the hunting-associated mortality is going to be compensatory or additive. Yeah, this is something that comes up all the time, and we've talked about it a bunch of times, is when people say people say like deer are overpopulated it's kind of like well by whose measure right because it could be that oftentimes from a hunter's perspective they're hardly overpopulated like i don't see it matter of fact i didn't even get one last year yeah but from a from the automobile insurance industry might think they're way overpopulated

when you look at how many claims they're handling for deer car collisions. Agricultural interests might say they're overpopulated when they're looking at orchard damage or people who are losing whole orchard plantings to deer, and they might argue that it's overabundant. And so I think that they're that wildlife managers are always needing to manipulate the valve because on one hand they're hearing from hunters we want more deer on the landscape we want higher success rates and other people you know

automobile insurance ag and a host of others in some places even like the landscaping industry, is saying like, man, we got to close that valve up. And you're making like constant micro adjustments. Yeah. And they're rooted in different value sets. somebody who values a system in which you have all the all the players present and interacting the way they have evolved to interact another criterion by which you could you could measure deer over abundance would be are there so many deer on the landscape that they're having a negative effect on other species that are part of that ecosystem and there are plenty of examples where that's been shown to be the case so yeah like the big drive to lower snow geese numbers

has as much to do with protecting their habitat arctic like arctic coastal habitat as it does grain fields in louisiana and texas and there are places where that's true for whitetail deer as well, where the idea of trying to bring deer to meet a particular objective, bring numbers down, is driven by trying to protect other elements of that ecosystem. So I think it's the Canada yew is a plant up in northern Wisconsin that historically was much more abundant and it's it's you know like candy to the deer in the wintertime and it's basically been eliminated from much of northern Wisconsin and the only places you have little pockets of it are on the Apostle Islands where the the deer densities are either zero or really low so

there are plenty of examples for a variety of species where their overabundance has resulted in major implications to the ecosystem. So you have these criteria that are social, like the insurance example, or the farmer trying to grow corn or soybeans, and then you have other criteria that are driven more around ecology. And which one of those you put more weight on is going to be very subjective, right? What do you care most about? If you're the farmer, you might think of deer as rats with antlers. And if you're a guy who waits all year to have that week of deer season and you want to be able to fill x number of tags

you might have a very different perception of what too many deer looks like this leads into another question pete you cool oh yeah what i was gonna ask you a minute for uh um i just want to come on how bad your australian accent was it's terrible when uh let's say you work at a place like stone glacier um why do companies why are companies secret about like what's the argument to be secret about a product you're gonna make sure like what are they afraid of um they afraid of? I think there's just a time and a place to kind of lay out the unveiling of it and the hype.

That hype is valuable. Right, marketing. You want to time that correctly. Gotcha. With the delivering of the product. But look, man, when a new Star Wars movie's coming out, they release trailers for trailers. That's true. way ahead of time yeah man we're done the 20

questions because i had one one time i asked this to a guy who works in apparel he was explaining me there is when you announce new stuff coming out it people will stop buying the currently available stuff because they're like well i'm just gonna wait for the new stuff and then you could be in a situation where you're left holding sure because they're like oh i was gonna buy a 2016 yeah but screw it now i'm just gonna wait for the sweet new you can see like in cars right and also you realize man once we told about this bitch a new 2019 truck 2018 truck sales everybody just put it off because they're waiting for the new one but in a situation

like this where a company's launching a product they don't currently make that argument doesn't hold water it's very true you should think about all this yeah i'm taking notes um that's funny because i haven't seen you write anything down you didn't give me a pen when i came in uh yeah i think it's just the timing of the of the hype and you know you don't want people to forget about it you want oh to uh tell them about it when they can actually buy it yep or close to it yeah yeah and not just get forgotten and blown away in the wind can i get one of those blue hoodies yeah we just came out with these yesterday can you tell people about it it's a blue hoodie it's a blue it's a bright blue hoodie and it has uh the american flag on my chest and uh the stone glacier logo as well i wear this

year's stone glacier shirt because my wife said it makes me look a little younger yeah it's got a useful apparently yeah which apparently is um something she cares about that's our uh being a shadow lady the shadow lady that she is that's our jersey for our softball team a little leaguer our uh do i look like a little league player in this no you could some badass mountain hunter man our softball team name is the stone glacier u crushers that's good it's a good name you like not you would but you e w correct okay carl this is a real doozy a major doozy all right and it's long it's a long angry email favorite kind a long angry email and i love the guy he owns the entire collection of uh meat eater tv show so he's not a freeloader wants to point

that out he is critical here where he says boys i know you guys generally don't find fault in biologists and government agencies and whatnot, but come on. Are you sure you want me to do the answers this way? But come on. And, you know, I don't know that's an entirely fair statement. I feel that I can find plenty of situations where I have not been happy about something that a government agency has done. For instance, the state of New Jersey, closing bear season, that's a government agency making a move that I think is ridiculous and misguided.

So we've talked about plenty of times when government agencies have screwed up. But here's his angriness. Here's his problem. He's from Georgia, and he keeps wanting to go up to hunt moose in Maine. And he's saying how they keep counting moose in Maine. They're like, oh, so Maine's 35,385 square miles. It's a huge place. It's got one year they say maybe they got 60,000 moose in Maine on the low end.

Then there's a count that comes out, and there's someone that does an estimate. Maybe we've got 75,000 moose in Maine. So he's pointing out, man, shitloads of moose in Maine. But then there's some talk about how they're wondering what the increasingly warm weather in maine kind of what kind of impacts it's having on moose and there's a lot of worry about increasingly warm summers and what and increasingly warm winters and they're reducing the number of tags available to hunters even

though they still have apparently quite a lot of moose. Like how in the world, he's wondering, could it be that the number of tags they're issuing, how could it be as low as 2,140 moose tags when you've got perhaps 75,000 moose? Then the writer does something a little bit confusing where he starts pointing out that the canadian provinces to the north of maine have many more moose 212 000 new finland maybe has around 330 000 so he's saying you got all these moose all over the place why isn't maine killing more i want to dispatch with a couple of the ideas before we turn it over to carl and a couple ideas people one if you're the moose manager in maine who cares what they have in new finland or new brunswick yeah you wouldn't say i'm gonna

kill all the deer in iowa because ohio's got a lot of deer right so that really isn't like a valid point and not only that but if you look maine doesn't manage moose by maine they manage moose by very like micro chunks of ground so they have you know you have districts and regions and you're making like micro management decisions sometimes down to a single valley so it doesn't like it's germane to be like to talk about how many are in other places let's focus on the core of the question he's sort of accusing them of saying they're all worried about climate change so they're saying we can't go kill moose even though there's a ton of moose and they're not letting us get at as many now carl can you speak to what's going on

and it's happening in more places than maine what's going on with some of the trepidation around where moose are at, what role hunting is playing with moose, what might be happening to moose, right? Can you dig in? Totally. Totally. And before I dig into the science side of it, I'm thinking about a strategy for trying to get a moose tag right because you're thinking about this guy's strategy i guess

maine would be awesome but this is getting back to you know the beginning of the podcast we were talking about the idea of having a beer if i said you want to go moose hunting? You're going to say, well, only if it's in Maine. Well, he can drive. He's in Georgia, and he can drive to Maine. And Pete was just telling me, tell these guys. Yeah, I also put in for a moose tag in Maine this year for a couple different reasons. One, I really want to go moose hunting,

a lot like this guy that rode in. Phil. Phil, yeah. Sounds like Phil really wants a moose tag. lot like this uh this guy that rode in um phil phil yeah sounds like phil really wants a moose tag i do too i have 10 bonus points in montana as a resident in the area i put in for my draw odds are still sub four percent it's like three and a half percent chance that i'll draw this tag this year there are no bonus points in maine it's very affordable to put your name in the hat and i think i have a seven or eight percent chance so pete would argue that they're still doing a good job on giving out opportunity in maine i was doing some quick math in my head i'm not real good at math but uh a little over 2 000 tags to 60 000 moose that seems like somewhere

in the ballpark of what a three four percent target objective of harvest that seems uh pretty normal to me so i guess my it can it can it can vary those percentages can vary widely depending on a host of factors but it's definitely not unusual i think like you would know this i think with mountain goats i think like in excess of five percent is dangerous correct yeah like washington manages for a one percent harvest objective of mountain goats montana manages for four so different states choose different numbers to shoot for but if moose or anything like mountain goats sounds like man's on par for the course here. For Phil, I'm going to criticize the state agency. I think that the Washington – I think at Washington Fish and Game, I think their perspective on harvest numbers for mountain goats is ridiculous.

And I think – and this is a bold – I can't back it up, but I feel there's kind of a – there is a's there's a sentiment there seems to at times be a sentiment there um of not maximizing of not maximizing opportunity totally they're kind of like i guess we gotta allow them to do some hunting yeah yeah i don't think you're alone in that feeling i think because the one percent is is you know or whatever it is like to be on such the low end of the acceptable spectrum i think there's a great argument and i've read the arguments made that like in excess of five percent can get dangerous on these on mountain goat populations because of low fecundity high risk of natural disaster you know that they die

by accident and avalanches rock, rocks, slides, falling. It takes a lot to get a mature nanny who's reproductively successful. I understand all that. I'm not disparaging the idea of applying for a Maine moose tag. My point is, if he'd even limited himself to the lower 48, he could be throwing in... If his idea is like, I want to go on a moose hunt, he should be applying, I would would say anywhere there's an opportunity and it can't be that much farther to drive that's

wyoming from georgia it's not like maine is in the backyard it's not like maine is in the backyard of georgia so he could be he could be applying in i don't know eight or nine states yeah yeah i wonder why maine and you're so fixated yeah i'm coming at this from the standpoint of having just hunted moose in idaho last year yeah you got a bull with your boat as a non-resident as a non-resident nice and and shout out to the state of idaho i love the way i'm sure some people hate it but forcing you to choose yeah one species and then having a real likelihood of actually drawing a tag with no point system i think is really cool you want to call in a bull there i called in several bulls and managed to get one at close range with your bow and arrow my bow yeah it was an awesome hunt and had a great group of

friends there it was a once in a lifetime experience literally because now i'm you know prohibited from ever applying for a bull tag in idaho again and you ran into our resident enforcement specialist i did yeah i did the guy i call when i got an enforcement when i got an enforcement question eric crawford wonderful guy he actually man he was kind enough to come out and visit camp and register the bull for me but um the reason i'm bringing up idaho is can i can i interrupt you real quick yeah sure uh did you did you enjoy uh was the moose meat pretty good it's been excellent i'm still i mean yeah you use it past past tense is not appropriate here because i'm gonna be eating that moose did you date it or when you see moose you know what that moose was

yeah no i don't have to worry about like oh which moose was this in my freezer you know some other fossils later no dude there will there will be no freezer fossils i agree with steve's advice on that um but i have been very generous too that's the other nice thing about having a moose is being able to dole out some meat and this is the smallest of the subspecies too right it's a shiris bull but still a very large animal and my buds who came and joined me each left with a cooler full of meat so i'm digressing here but the point is for this listener don't limit yourself just to maine for a starter you're starting out with some advice yeah don't limit yourself just to maine if you want to go moose hunting and you want to drive there because you could just go buy over the counter up in Alaska, right? And make it happen, which is going to be

more expensive, more logistically challenging. But if you want to hunt moose... Getting the meat home is very tough. Yes. Not tough, not tough. It's expensive. So if you want to limit yourself to the lower 48, I would point out Maine is not in the backyard of Georgia. For a similar distance of driving, you could be going up and hunting some of those other northern rocky states, northwest states. And if you're lucky enough to draw, obviously, the more hats you have your name in, the higher the chances. So all that being said.

I like it, though. All right. You know what my dad always said? He didn't invent this. Don't curse the darkness. Light a candle. Light a candle light a candle nice like to think the old man came up with that balance like he did i'd like to think that maybe we're lighting a candle here and and you just lit phil's candle well so go well if phil's lucky enough to uh draw a tag up in idaho i'd be happy to chat with him too about the planning there it It was a fantastic experience.

All right. So what's going on with moose? I would refute something that Steve said where... What? It's not allowed. You made this comment. I don't like where this is going at all. Don't worry. It's nothing too major. But you made this comment that what's happening in those more northern provinces is not relevant to what's happening in Maine. But in fact, it's part of the story because Maine and our other moose hunting opportunities in the lower 48 represent the southern limit of the species range. So when you're in that situation and you're

talking about hunting opportunity at the very fringes of a species distribution, you're already kind of starting off on a difficult foot because you're talking about hunting an animal that is inherently existing at the limits of its capacity to exist so moose are an animal i'm sorry but what's the part that i said that's bad uh you said what was happening in those in those canadian provinces i think you mentioned new finland and new brunswick it wasn't relevant you said just because they're killing all the deer in state X, I don't need to worry about... You said, just because the hunting is great in Iowa, I'm going to go ahead and kill all the deer here in whatever state I'm in. Okay.

And I'm saying, to set the stage for the biology, the story here, it's important to recognize that there's a fundamental difference as you go north for the moose into the core of its range i don't want to belabor this but this is that was not what i was saying you okay that's true you said for him to say hey maine has 60 000 moose they should give out more tags in maine because a neighboring canadian province has 300 000 okay i was i thought you were saying in essence what's happening in those other provinces is irrelevant to what's happening here no okay not at all go ahead well then i'll i apologize for misinterpreting the point is what's happening in those other provinces thank you is that they are they represent really kind of the the core of the of the distribution that is a place where for a variety of reasons moose are able to thrive in contrast to the

southern limits of their range i.e maine okay so in maine you're talking about an animal that has evolved to withstand very cold weather. There's this idea in ecology and in species evolution of a thermo. And you talked about this actually with some of your buffalo work, but the thermo neutral zone. So if you think about being a human being you know the range of temperatures where we can hang out and be pretty comfortable let's say the lower limit is maybe 50 degrees and you know you could ask a human a biologist who who studies people a physiologist you could ask what the what the actual numbers are but let's say it's 50 degrees without many clothes on yeah if you get below that you start shivering right and that shivering

comes with an energetic cost yeah and on the upper limit when do you start getting uncomfortable what do you say 95 95 you're a better man than i am damn he's durable man he's durable so i start i start breaking a sweat if I'm just hanging out, let's say 85, whatever, you get the idea. So whether you're trying to keep yourself warm through shivering or trying to cool yourself off through sweating in our case, or if you can't sweat, panting,

some sort of physiological response to either heat or cool yourself, those things come at a cost. So there's this envelope where you can exist without any energetic cost associated with addressing an uncomfortable temperature. Yeah, you know, and for the buffalo, I remember you writing that it's some absurd, like you can crank them down.

They couldn't find it. So in my book, American Buffalo, I talk about this study they did where they took like a Holstein or just some run-of-the-mill cow. They took a Tibetan yak. I think they had a Scottish Highland, some variety like Scottish Highland cow

and a buffalo, and they put them in these shipping containers with monitors on to see when they had like a metabolic increase related to the temperature yeah so basically that it would start to shiver or start to expend energy to keep warm and they hit it like very quickly with the regular cow um i don't know what it was 20 degrees or whatever the hell was like like surprisingly like still surprisingly warm and it hit with a regular cow.

And then I think the Scottish Highland cattle, the Scottish Highland cow tapped out. The Tibetan yak might have tapped out at negative 30. And they couldn't get, they could never get the container cold enough to tap it out. They couldn't tap it out of the buffalo. Yeah. And they might have tried, like, I don't know,

I don't know if they got it to negative 70, but they couldn't find the point when it had a metabolic increase related to cold. Wow. Meaning some bitch is cold tolerant. Yes. As are moose. They are very cold tolerant. Can I tell another quick story? Yeah, sure, man.

This is your gig, baby. So cold tolerant. So cold tolerant. So cold tolerant. Yeah. That there was a, they were once trying to do some account on a buffalo herd in Canada. And they're out in the winter. Yeah. And they were using thermal imaging to find the animals. They could never find them. Because they're so well insulated.

One day a guy noticed when he's looking at the images how he sees these little teeny crescent, these little teeny black crescent shapes that didn't make sense and what he later realized was the horn is their belly that when one's laying on its side and its belly hair is exposed you would now and then hit a little bit of its belly but it's so well insulated that you're not picking up warmth off of his back. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxm maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all it's a great a great story and a great example of how a given animal can be so well adapted to a very cold envelope. All right. So moose, like the buffalo, are well adapted to withstand some extremely cold temperatures. But it doesn't take particularly warm temperatures for them to need to start regulating their body heat down, which is one of the reasons that in the summertime, in addition to there being plenty of good forage in aquatic habitats,

you see moose in the water all day. They're there to escape insects. They're there to access really rich food supplies. And they're also there to cool down. So the issue of keeping cool in the summer for a moose is a way bigger deal than the issue of keeping warm in the winter. So in a place like Maine, they're at the southern extent of their range. And as we have climate warming and temperature envelopes shifting north it gets increasingly difficult for moose to thermoregulate in the summer at the lower extent of their range there's a a very real cost to their fitness associated with those warmer temperatures in the summer, a longer summer season. But that's just the beginning of the story because there are a number of other complex

interactions occurring on the landscape associated with relatively mild winters, relatively warm summers that play into this as well. And part of the story here is with warmer winters, milder winters, the ticks do much better at overwintering. So there are a number of examples of kind of natural biological processes that can really ramp up in the absence of super cold winters. Ticks being one. Another one is the example of some of these pine beetle infestations in the West where it takes a really cold winter to kill off the larvae. And in the absence of a cold winter for a few years, you end up with these huge insect outbreaks, these huge insect epidemics. And another example would be relatively warm falls and springs and wetter weather resulting in more episodic hemorrhagic disease outbreaks in white-tailed deer, EHD. So changes in weather associated with our climate

can have major impacts to wildlife and habitat. In those cases, it just doesn't get cold enough to kill the parasites. Yes. And with the moose population in Maine, part of the story is these tick loads getting to be so severe that in portions of the state, they're clearly having a major impact on the survivorship of moose. So not only is it harder for them to last through warmer summers, but then they're added on with this heavy load of ticks. But the story doesn't end there either. As these warmer, milder conditions continue to shift north, another trend is that you have increasing overlap between white-tailed deer and moose. The deer do relatively well. Really cold, gnarly winters are much harder for white tails to withstand than for moose to withstand. And there's limited evidence to suggest that there's direct competition for forage between

the two species. Some folks think maybe deer are a significant direct competitor with moose for forage. Other folks think maybe not. But one thing that the white tails do bring with them are these meningeal worms. So another parasite story. And the species name of the meningeal worm is Paralophostrogilus tennius. So given that that's such a mouthful, you can understand why they like to refer to them as meningeial worms. And the meninges are these three layers that wrap around the brain and spinal cord of all mammals. And if you ever have heard of anybody going in to get like a cerebrospinal fluid tap, that fluid exists between a couple of these meningial layers. And the whole system exists to provide kind

of a a shield like a layer of protection and cushioning around these really important so spinal spinal meningitis was come from the same word yes yeah so meningitis just means the swelling of the meninges these three layers so in white-tailed deer this worm it has a super fascinating um life cycle and i'll start with the adults laying eggs in the meninges in these these layers that wrap around the brain and the spinal cord so the adults lay these eggs the eggs land on the deer's nostrils no so we'll start with an infected an infected white-tailed deer okay with adults that start there and we'll come back around to it so we'll talk about the mode of exposure i'll let you do it but i don't agree okay where do you want to start i wouldn't do it that way you know i want to start with he wants the exposure i would

start with the introduction all right but you don't need to i'm just telling what i would do i'll go with you so chicken and the egg imagine a white-tailed deer is walking through the woods out dicking around in the woods cruising along and squirreling around yep it comes upon a a tuft of its preferred browse. Pick a species. What do you want it to be eaten? Man. Did you see that footage of a deer eating eggs out of a bird nest?

Yeah. Pick something. Pick something more. I can't pick little baby birds? Chickadees? No. It comes across. It decides to.

Can I pick a mushroom? Sure. Okay eden morel okay so this deer comes upon a black or white morel uh morcella conicus okay morcella conicus and as it lowers its muzzle to nibble upon the head of this morel inadvertently without even knowing it has done so it happens to consume a gastropod do you want it to be a snail or a slug because it could be either a snail okay so this this two-year-old doe which this isn't making a lot of sense because you find those things in morels all the time yes you do and it's an interesting part of the story too in terms of the distribution of this disease and it's an interesting part of the story too in terms of the distribution of this disease and i'll get to that so this two-year-old white-tailed doe nibbles down on this morel mushroom and ends up consuming inadvertently

and unbeknownst to itself a snail okay that snail is infected and i will come back around to how the snail got infected but i see the deer yeah because we're talking about a cycle right so you can jump into that circle anywhere along the way so the deer ingests the snail the snail has an advanced larval phase of this worm living inside of itself. Inside of it? Yes. Which it has contracted by eating the mucus on a fecal pellet from a different deer. And I'll come back around to that fecal pellet. Now I know why you wanted to start where you wanted to start.

It's confusing, but I think... You should have stuck to your guns, man. I'm good. One thing about the listenership of this digital radio program is they're a pretty savvy bunch, so they'll be able to track this. So the doe has consumed the snail. Upon doing so,

the larval phase of the worm is consumed, ends up in the stomach, matures, makes it into the stomach wall. From the stomach wall, travels to the central nervous system. Through the bloodstream. Through the bloodstream. Through the bloodstream. Makes it to, in white-tailed deer, the meningeal tissues,

the layers around the brain and the spinal cord, where it then proceeds to lay eggs. Those eggs hatch into stage one larvae, dislodge, travel to the lungs, where they are then coughed up by the deer and ingested into the stomach. Wow. At which point... They already were in the stomach.

They are defecated and end up in the mucus where a snail or slug consumes the mucus that is infected with the larvae that's another thing you see now and then snails on snails and slugs on snails on droppings yeah yeah they eat that that mucus, which can be infected. So you have this cycle of adult worm to lung to digestive tract to feces, mucus, to gastropods, snails or slugs consuming it, to those snails or slugs then being than being eaten inadvertently by other cervids, other ungulates. The interesting thing about this worm, though, is that white-tailed deer are uniquely able to carry the infection without having really negative consequences associated. So even other deer species, of course, which the moose is one,

but mule deer, moose, caribou, all have the potential for this infestation, this infection, this parasitism to go beyond the meningeal layers and actually have the infection end up in their brain tissue so in white-tailed deer the worm is limited to existing in the meningeal tissue in these other species that can end up in the brain and have a major impact, including causing potentially mortality. Is it reasonable to assume here that whitetail deer have been exposed to this for a very, very long time? And what's interesting, and this gets to the comment earlier about seeing a snail or a slug on a pile. That's something I think you see quite a

bit when you're in the east, these relatively moist forests. This is not an issue that we see west of the Great Plains. So this is something that in moose populations in minnesota and maine has been a big issue but not so much west and it's thought that those grassland biomes that exist between kind of eastern moose populations and the western moose population serve as a barrier for the spread of this disease yeah the arid landscapes right and those arid landscapes it's poor habitat for gastropods okay right so as white-tailed deer expand their range northward they bring with them this worm that has the potential to have a very different effect on moose than it has on deer and you could understand moose that are out there foraging consuming vegetation and also potentially gastropods, there's plenty of

opportunity for deer to infect moose. So again, getting back to the idea of climate and how changes, even if it's a matter of like a one year that's particularly warm or dry. And this is why there's so much complexity in the system. If you have a hot and dry year, you know that that might be a worse year for gastropods. If it's hot and dry, snails and slugs aren't going to be doing as well. But if you have a relatively long window of non-snow time, that's going to be a longer window of potential infection when those gastropods can be active so you have changes in the distribution of white-tailed deer you have changes in the weather and the climate that have the potential to impact the activity and window of exposure opportunity

through the life history of snails and slugs, you have these thermoregulatory considerations that the species is already existing kind of at the limit of its range, its ability to deal with those conditions. You have the ticks. And so there's no one answer, right? It's a very complex story, but it gets back to the topic of compensatory versus additive mortality. One thing is for sure, and it is that the decline of moose at the lower limit of their range is not happening as a result of hunting. It's happening independent of hunting but it's very hard for wildlife managers to justify issuing a lot of tags to hunt a population that's in decline and in another one of the states being affected by these dynamics the state of minnesota which has a very rich history of moose hunting. They made the tough call in 2013 to completely stop their moose hunt.

And it's some of these same drivers. My understanding is in Maine, it's much more of a, the ticks are a way bigger deal. But this story about the meningeal worms and the northward expansion of white-tailed deer, that's something in Minnesota that goes back to 1912 was the first year that they were really starting to try to figure out, we've got these declines in moose, what's going on? A lot of research has been done in Minnesota around these white-tailed moose interactions. population viability assessment a few years ago, basically looking at recruitment and mortality of the moose population and their projections for the state of Minnesota that it's, where that it is possible within the next 50 years, they might not have moose in Minnesota anymore in the absence of any further hunting. So totally appreciate Phil's excitement about hunting moose and having now punched my card as a bona fide moose hunter i would strongly encourage him to explore possibilities

but these questions um they might seem really simple on their surface why won't the state of minnesota why won't the state of of Maine issue more moose tags? It's hard for me to draw a moose tag. And then you start getting into the complexities of the system and the specialized evolutionary traits of the moose with this disease ecology layered over it and a changing climate and distribution in whitetails layered over it

and what i take away from that are a couple things one these management decisions are very complex and difficult two there's huge value in having wildlife professionals on the landscape looking into this stuff trying to figure out what's going on, and then applying that science to management decisions. And one other point I'd share is there are other interests being considered in the issuance of tags. That moose population is also something that plenty of other recreational users appreciate and want to see on the landscape. And when a state is deciding how many tags to issue, they're taking into consideration

providing hunting opportunity. They're also taking into consideration wildlife viewing and all the other folks that want to be involved in the conversation. And some states are more more geared towards providing maximized hunting opportunity. Other states, like what you were saying for the state of Washington, maybe they're trying to balance a variety of public values when they're coming to these wildlife management decisions in terms of issuing tag allocations. So if you're sitting there in the chair of the biologist whose job it is to say, all right, we are going to issue X number of tags this year, and you've got the social considerations, you've got the disease considerations, you've got all this information at your disposal. It's a tough

chair to sit in. I think that where someone would wind up becoming frustrated is if you were looking at, well, we don't have a population problem right now, but we're concerned about what climate issues might mean in the future. Therefore, we're going to throttle back hunting because we have a big question mark about what's going on ahead. I think that people could look at that and get frustrated. And they could look at it and get frustrated too

in the social consideration thing where a state might be like, you know what, we're going to start paying more attention to people who identify as a wildlife viewer and make sure that they're having more opportunity and shift away from a user group that we used to put emphasis on. And I could see getting really frustrated with that. Yeah, I can too.

Another piece of the story that we didn't talk about is some of the ongoing research that they've done. And one of the more recent moose studies that occurred in Maine, they had very high mortality among a number of collared individuals. 30 of 70. 30 of 70.

And that's a gross simplification of the study. You've got some of the information in front of you. I'm just pulling this from Phil. Yeah, so Phil knows about the study. So if you have indicators like that, they're investing money in research, they're tracking the population. He provided some of the historical data

and context in his email. They have information at their disposal that leads them to believe this is a population that is in decline. They're trying to get to the bottom of what the management options are, but it's not like they're just thinking, well, down the line, this might be an issue, so we're going to make a very conservative management call today. They believe there's a need to act today, and they're issuing tags based on that information they have at their disposal. I absolutely agree with you that it would be a source of frustration if they were taking an overly conservative management call now,

thinking there's this long-term climate trajectory that they're trying to be responsive to. That's not the case. They've got an issue with declining moose. They've got an issue with high mortality. They're worried about hunting being a source of additive mortality to that population. Very similar to the call in Minnesota to close the hunt. Could they have a few tags being issued in Minnesota? Probably so. But at what point do you make the call that you've got enough concern, sufficient concern about the decline that you need to take action? So I think the throttling back of tags, I certainly would not second guess any of my counterparts there in the state who are looking at the data day in and day out and investing time

in those surveys. And having all that information, all that science really puts people on good footing to be able to make well-informed decisions. And getting back to something you said earlier about the funding and how, you know, we should be quick to tout the fact that hunters and fishermen and their license dollars are going to do all this good habitat work. We wouldn't have any of these studies occurring in the absence of support from the hunting and fishing community either. It's not just money going to support law enforcement and habitat work. It's providing all this scientific information that underpins these management decisions. So when you've got such a

complicated life history story as this meningeal worm, think about how much research went into picking that apart and understanding what the dynamics are, just so you can have the information in your hands to start to talk about what your management options are. Imagine if you're trying to make a management decision about this and you don't understand these nuances about the ecology of what's happening on the landscape. So I come away with just a lot of gratitude and appreciation for how fundamentally difficult

some of these management decisions are, as opposed to a desire to cast stones yeah i think it's helpful too for someone who starts to think like man i'm starting to detect a anti-hunting bias yeah in my state fishing game agency if you if you feel that i think you should probably go and try to find where it's a theme that you're seeing occurring across a bunch of different wildlife resources so if you find that deer tags going through the roof no real change no dramatic unexplicable change in bear tag numbers yeah that's a great suggestion turkey season is still long waterfowl season is still long fisheries are still right but there's this one anomaly like man they're really cutting back

on moose you could probably look at that and be like this is probably about moose yep i think that's a fair assessment and not seeing some like general thing where they're generally being like you know what let's try to get fewer hunters out in the landscape in any way we can think of and we'll manipulate data and use you know hypothetical scenarios that could occur in the future as a justification to throttle back hunter participation um you gotta look at a big picture and that's in contrast to a statewide bear hunting closure or a statewide lion hunting closure that's not at all rooted in any kind of science yeah well you know in maine i'm sure you followed this there was a they tried to do a referendum to ban uh baiting and hounds for bears which would basically make you know a lot of hunting in maine very

difficult and it got soundly defeated by the voting public so there you even have you still have a strongly pro-hunting voting population in Maine. They trounced that thing, that initiative, referendum. So hopefully that story helps a bit. Dude, if this guy listened to 70 podcasts in one month, I'm having to think he's going to get to this and find where we address his concerns. I hope Phil draws his tag. I do too. Pete's going to run into this and find where we address his concerns. I hope Phil draws his tag. I do too.

Pete's going to run into him. Put him for Idaho, man. When Pete draws, he's going to have some other guy come in and blow out his area and be like, your name ain't Phil, is it? Quick question. Yeah. Can those meningeal worms transmit to humans? There is not any evidence in the literature I've come upon that indicates that to be the case,

but there is a host of other species. I talked about mule deer, elk, caribou, domestic sheep and goats, and then your bro might be interested to know this, Steve, but llamas and alpacas can also be infected with a meningeal worm. I didn't want to have to think about quitting eating murals. Yeah. Are you eating them raw? I mean, I have. Nice. about quitting eating morels yeah well you are you eating them raw i mean i have nice sounded very trigonosis like rolling the dice parasites swimming around in you can i give a couple points just to

just to add a little bit a couple points that came from ed arnett when i put this moose question to him yeah he had a couple good points he usually does He usually does. So he bullet points out a few things to think about here. He points out that residents always have top priority for special trophy animals. And in Maine, only 10% of the tags for each of the four management units. So Maine divides its moose up into four management units. Only 10% even go to non-residents.

So he goes on to say that a non-resident's odds stay proportionally the same as everyone else and vary with how many Georgia and other non-resident guys are applying for any given tag. He says that people in Maine are inherently conditioned to having a very conservative number of hunting tags uh mean they like to play it safe and proposed increases in tag allocations are often met with considerable pushback he says there's a cultural social aspect here that a person from Georgia may not fully appreciate. Says apparently a few years ago, the department did get more aggressive and issued more tags, more moose tags. And that happened to coincide with one of the big tick outbreaks that resulted in higher than expected mortality. It was a double whammy, if you will.

And they took a lot of shit from the public. He also says, in the last 10 years, they've perfected better survey methods, data, and modeling approaches, and they're probably operating now on better population estimates than they were operating on in past years. So they may have had assumptions about how many moose they had that were different than what they're now thinking is true.

And if you're shooting for those certain percentages, you're going to see a lowering just because you're operating on better information. He also goes on to say this, where tick outbreaks have had the highest impact the department would like to kill more animals to reduce densities but as you might guess the public doesn't get that too well meaning they're going to say you want to kill more moose who are already dying from ticks and they're going to push back on this good stuff man deadly edly um uh i didn't even get to the main thing i want to talk about man what was that we've covered some ground dude oh my god what the main thing i want to talk about

yeah was the okay yeah how long we've been talking here we've been going for a while we can do one more though if you can do it in 10 minutes this is my concluding thought we have over the months got many many requests for comment about an issue that's going on in alaska that's been generating a ton of headlines here in the lower 48 in the national media. And it has to do with something that's happened with certain hunting practices being banned on certain lands in Alaska. To give you a little bit of background, states manage their own wildlife. And with exceptions of if something is protected under the Endangered Species Act or it has federal oversight because it's migratory and actually moves very fluidly across geopolitical boundaries, right? right then the federal government was going to provide some management oversight so that one state isn't inadvertently screwing another state over meaning you kill all the ducks let's just say

you were to kill all the ducks in alaska well a dude in texas is going to have you know or a dude down in the the you know the valley in california you've just screwed that guy over so there's some insulation from one state making a bad move on migratory stuff and that's where you might have federal oversight but generally if things aren't or you know another example be like marine mammals there's a federal marine mammal protection act but generally a state manages its own wildlife as it sees fit um in 2015 during the obama administration there was a ruling that came through the Interior Department at the time that eliminated certain management tools or certain things that the state of Alaska at times allowed, and they eliminated the state's ability to use certain management tools on federal preserve land in Alaska.

This did not affect the remainder of the state. So about 13% of Alaska is federal preserve. And they said on this 13% of Alaska, we're going to eliminate such things as the ability to shoot caribou from a boat. So you'd use a boat to go shoot a swimming caribou. That you would be able to use dogs or bait for hunting bears. That you would have wolf and bear seasons that were open during spring, like denning and calving and pup raising times of year.

This was like deeply unpopular with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game because it would be similar to, let's say you have a city, like let's say you take New York and they have all their traffic laws and their traffic laws work very well. No one can look and say, man, your traffic laws are screwed up, but we're going to do something. If a road passes by a federal building, we're going

to give you a different set of traffic laws that we would like you to enforce. It's not based on the fact that there's a problem with your traffic laws. It's just, we've decided that we think that a few things should be different, that you should drive on the left side of the road if you're passing federal property. And we'd like you to go in and have these little discrepancies on your landscape, these management discrepancies with how you're handling traffic. And the police there might be like, one,'s the problem you're not showing us you're not demonstrating that we've done something wrong you're making our jobs much more complicated it's more complicated for the public to understand what's going on so we just generally don't like

the fact that you're inserting yourself here in this way um and it created some real like states rights federal rights issues so now the state department i'm sorry now the interior department is moving to correct this and they're setting the regulations back to the way they were prior to this earlier law that went into place in 2015 making it that the state can manage wildlife as it sees fit on federal preserves, as they had always done, except for this narrow window of time of three years when they weren't able to do certain practices

on 13% of the state. The way it's covered, though, in the media is it's like, they're changing the laws so that people can now go dig cubs out of the den and kill them. Okay. Where does that come from? When someone says that, what are they talking about? What they're talking about is this. There are some areas in Alaska where they have a lot of black bears.

Let's say they have tons of black bears, not a lot of harvest of said black bears. And for management's sake, they just say that there's no closed season on black bears. A person is allowed two black bears a year, no closed season. Someone might look at that and be like, oh, if that's the case, I suppose that means you could go dig a bear out of its den and kill it. But does that mean that anyone actually does this? Already right now, 87% of Alaska is already open to people pulling cubs out of dens and killing them. I can't think of a single instance where this has happened outside of the Koyukuk and native Alaskan group, an indigenous group who resides along the Yukon and Koyukan rivers. They traditionally hunt bears in the winter by digging them out of dens, a practice that they

have engaged in for thousands of years. That's how they hunt. Now, if you're the kind of person who likes a sort of cultural imperialism that would come in and tell an indigenous group of people who's acted a certain way for many thousands of years and live in harmony with its environment, that they've got it all wrong, that they're not sportsman-like because they have a traditional use practice of eating baramy in the winter that they pull out of dens, then go ahead and be that kind of guy. But as far as what goes on with regular hunters, like people who are operating under sport hunting licenses, it is not a practice to dig cubs out of their dens and kill them. There's no need, there's no demand. It'd be like saying this. If you live in New York and you open your trash can up and you find a little nest of

rat babies in your trash can, okay, it would theoretically be legal for you to take a dull knitting needle and slowly kill all those rat babies with a dull knitting needle. Theoretically, one could go do that so to say that people in new york are allowed to kill rats that they find in their home or in their garbage cans you could put it that way or you could be the kind of guy who says it's now legal for people in new york to brutally slaughter baby rats with dull knitting needles because sure i'm sure if you're the kind of person who reads that that way yeah another way would be to put it is that you're allowed to like control rats in your home so like the the constant

twisting is the other is the article in nbc news which like because you because you're allowed to already bait bears depending on where you are in in% or 87% of Alaska. It's like, now you can kill bears using donuts and bacon. Like the journalists went to such specificity that they've called out like, they're like, what would be the most egregious sort of bear bait? I guess it'd be donuts and bacon. And I'll use that as a headline to explain my story.

Or that they said you can use a spotlight to go kill baby cubs in their den. This isn't something anyone's doing. And in fact, just because the state has the ability to make it legal in this new 13% of their landmass, and they've already had the ability to make it legal in 87% of their landmass, doesn't mean that it already is. You can kill caribou from a boat in a couple extremely remote locations north of the Brooks Range.

It's a practice generally done by subsistence indigenous hunters who traditionally target caribou as their migration paths take them across some major rivers. Because other than that, these are inaccessible areas and you cannot get into the areas and transport the meat back. So they hunt along rivers and there's certain bottleneck points where migrating herds of thousands of caribou will come and encounter a river. It's the only place these people have an opportunity to intersect these herds of caribou and and that's where they hunt them, is on the river. There is nowhere, in fact, I've hunted all over Alaska, I've never hunted in a unit where you could kill a caribou from a boat in the water. So the fact that the state can allow it doesn't even mean that it can be allowed.

Where I hunt black bears in Alaska, the state could say you can go dig them out of a den, but you can't. There's a specific season and a specific quota. You have to apply for a permit. You get the permit about once every two years if you apply. When you apply, you have to specify whether you want to hunt the spring or the fall season. They both have date parameters around them. If you wound a bear and don't recover it, you notch your tag. It's that specific in the legality of it. Okay? So it's not that now Alaska is going to make it that I could go over there and dig baby bears out of their dens and torture them to death because you already can't anyway. But when they look at, when they're trying to do these management practices of maintaining stable populations of caribou and moose,

often with an eye toward providing subsistence cultures access to readily available protein sources, and these are things they can do in certain cases when they decide they might want to, doesn't mean that it's going to now be like the wholesale slaughter of baby animals everywhere it's just it's egregious how poorly represented this has been in the media yeah some of the headlines are outrageous it's almost become like a joke uh-huh

yeah to kill bears with bacon and donuts it's like yeah it's probably not gonna be bacon and donuts it's gonna be dog food oh my god it drives me nuts i don't even it's like i don't yeah i can't even i don't even know where to begin when talking about this i read an article that uh that there was a animal advocacy group from florida that traveled up to anchorage to protest all of this, the bear cub killing and they were met with a group, a college group of kids that were all indigenous Native American kids that

changed their mind. I think the group was called Protest One, if I'm remembering it correctly, and two advocates were going to protest for it and publicly speak out against it and this like college club explained it to them their traditional use practice correct and they went back to florida and had a public statement released that they changed their

position on it this nbc news article points out well it kind of the writer of the nbc article kind of goes crazy because pretty nbc article kind of goes crazy because pretty soon he's like talking about all of a sudden it has something to do with how donald trump's kids have been up to alaska hunting it's like these guys are like grabbing at straws right like trying to drag anything in and in it he says like things that are cruel okay so let's talk about that for a minute if there's a if there's a group people who traditionally hunts caribou as they're swimming across the river, do you understand anatomy and ballistics and stuff so much that you're saying that that's cruel? Or are you talking about something else? Because I don't really know. I don't really buy that, that shooting a caribou

at point blank range out of a boat they're usually shooting in the head when they do this that that's more cruel than when he's standing on the ground so you're like you're trying to like introduce these sort of you're trying to introduce these sort of like subjective words into a discussion where they don't really fit like it's not a cruelty issue that you kill a caribou in the water versus on land. I think what you're trying to get at, what this writer's trying to get at is some idea of like sportsmanlike. And I'll ask them too, like, okay,

are you really concerned with what's sportsmanlike or not? Are you honestly concerned with that? Are you honestly concerned with what's cruel or not cruel? Or do you kind of just hate the idea? And I would love to know if this son of a bitch eats meat because i guarantee he does but you just kind of like hate the idea of people utilizing like renewable resources and you're going to jump on any little point you can find to make it seem bad. I sent that to a buddy of mine that sent that article to me and I'd already seen it, but he's like, oh, you mean to tell me that NBC news wasn't open to nuance? It's just, oh my God, it's maddening. Michelle, what are your concluding

thoughts? I agree with you. It's maddening. But I've been thinking about how our discussion on identifying and sharing our values and motivations of why we hunt, how that kind of should be introduced and tied into the hunt purity scale. I think those should be some variables that we add. And I think by the end of this grand experiment and with Meat Eater, we're going to end up with a really refined tool. The Hunt Purity Scale. The problem with the Hunt Purity Scale, and I love the Hunt Purity Scale, and I was introduced by my brother,

I think that it's going to wind up needing to have a lot of emotional factors. I do too. You're going to have to start capturing state of mind. Right, yeah. Like how do you define success? There's variables within that like it's it's really everyone's gonna have their own personal scale exactly my brother his hunt purity scales is there's like a it reveals a tremendous amount of bias right so in crafting

a hunt purity scale that doesn't reveal personal bias or regional specific activities. Like it might be like a person in Texas would like inherently, they wouldn't get a high score on my brother's hunt purity scale because he puts, he puts the land management on his own hunt purity scale. So if he kills the elk on public land, he considers it like harder and more rewarding but if you live in a state that's 97 percent privately held his hunt purity scale doesn't do you any good i get it yeah it's a lot of personal bias a lot

of personal bias but uh super interesting to think about how those, how those subjective values play into that whole idea. Carl concluding thoughts. Oh, you had, you had one you wanted to get into like a real one. I do. I have a concluder. So Yanni,

can you, can you hit your concluders? No, for quiet. You still think about those cold beers? Depends what kind of beer it is. Oh no. If I get sidetracked right now, it's still turkey, still gobblers.

But no, I'll just go ahead and in the name of time and efficiency, I'll pass today. Okay. Because we have a lot ahead of us today. Pete? Pete? Yeah, I don't have any zingers here. Going to drop that product on us? No big epiphanies. Yeah, stay tuned. That's coming. Any zingers here? Nothing. Going to drop that product on us?

No big epiphanies. Yeah, stay tuned. That's coming. Yeah, thanks for inviting me in. So stay tuned at StoneGlacier.com. Lots coming. Is that what it is, StoneGlacier.com? Yes.

Yeah, hell of a website. Good backpacks. Yeah. Like them there backpacks. Very informative website. Lots. Thanks to Pete, man. A lot of like info. A lot of videos.

A lot of videos. You go there, you know exactly what's going on with your pack. They're good, man. I'm telling you, man. The packs though, it's like there's a little bit like when you get a pack that you kind of got to like, that does stuff. At first you're like huh what but the minute you start like figuring out how it all works it's like a whole different deal oh yeah but some people just want like a bag hooked to a shoulder strap

right which is like the kind of backpacks we had when we were kids they're like canvas sacks with two leather straps on them but once you get a bag at first you're like oh man like i gotta mess with it but once you learn to mess with it it changes everything yeah it's a technical piece of gear and like any piece of technical piece of gear there's a learning curve with it and we certainly encourage people to master that learning curve before you are standing over a dead elk yeah that it's like an adaptable it's like an adaptable type of backpack that like does a bunch of different things correct namely yeah day pack to meet hauler yeah okay carl let her rip all right so yesterday was a long day i had like a full work day and then flew up from albuquerque to bozeman and can i interrupt you for a minute yeah yeah didn't take long man i'm not gonna say another word after this but i want to point something out

yeah so i'd like you to justify this okay i like to think that when someone does a concluder yep that it's informed by what happened here today yeah but you're throwing a concluder at us that is like a a preconceived concluder yeah it, it is. Has your, so this is my question. Is your concluder, and I don't care, but do you feel that your concluder has been influenced by today's conversation? Oh, yeah. Oh, really?

Okay, go ahead. I'm done. Yeah, because we've had a chance to talk a little bit about kind of the psychology, the spiritual aspects of being involved actively in these systems. We've talked about that a bit today. And I did take the conversation there because it's been on my mind. And where I was going with my concluder is that yesterday was a long day.

And when I finally got into Bozeman last night and was putting my head on the pillow i had a hard time falling asleep right off the bat and i had these these few sort of recent um pieces of information floating around in my head in an interesting concoction and i'll try to lay it out so folks can follow me here but what happened was i got picked up by a by a hired car at the airport and was driving along with this dude, making some small talk. An app-based. An app-dependent ride-hailing service. Okay.

And I'm making small talk with the driver, a nice guy, talking about our families. And he mentioned he'd been married for 36 years, right? And I'm coming up on my 10th anniversary this year. I was like, oh. He's still married though. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. And so when I meet people, I'm a fan of trying to tap into the wisdom of our elders. So if I meet somebody who's been married for 36 years, I'm always interested to hear some words of wisdom. So I took the conversation there and he, I think, saw that as an opportunity to proselytize a little bit about his faith.

He's like, as long as you're asking me for advice, I'll tell you what I think is the main piece of advice. Yeah, which is cool. I mean, I'm open-minded and I've got friends from all different religious backgrounds and secular backgrounds, and I'm always interested to hear what folks believe at their cores. And so this guy, he summarized his perspectives on his religious faith as being the goal of trying to walk through life as if you're in a crowd without pushing anybody, like navigating through a crowd without pushing anybody. All right. And I'd never heard anybody

refer to their faith in that manner. So I thought that was an interesting sort of piece of wisdom. And I think right now in our culture as a country and in our culture as a globe, there's a lot of people pushing each other. And so this idea of trying to navigate in a way where you're mindful of other people. Still moving. Still moving, but mindful, right? Yeah. I thought that was cool and then as i was trying to fall asleep last night i was thinking about that and then i was thinking about a couple of papers like scientific papers that we'll include in the show notes so people can dive a

little deeper if they're interested in this and they're both very very recent papers that have been picked up in the popular press um the first paper is titled the biomass distribution on earth. And this group of scientists basically tried to assess in terms of carbon weight, if you take all the life on the planet, how is it distributed? And then how has it changed during the time that human beings have been on the planet and there's some incredible takeaways and if if folks are even remotely interested um please take a look at the paper itself because i'm going to do a very huge disservice by just skimming give us give us a zinger or two a few stats okay so right now today and and this is the units here are gigatons which is like a huge amount of carbon it's um if you imagine one kilogram and then put

12 zeros after it that's a gigaton of carbon and the reason they chose gigatons of carbon is because it it controls for all the creatures who have like a lot of water in their bodies. So it kind of normalizes among plants and animals. But a couple of takeaways are that humans represent an infinitesimal fraction of the total weight of biomass. But during the course of our existence, we have influenced this distribution of biomass unlike anything that has ever existed in the history of the planet, right? And we've done that by reducing the amount of wild animals and dramatically increasing the amount of domestic animals to the point that today, livestock represents 0.1 gigatons of the biomass compared to wild birds, 0.002.

So there are more, and this is in terms of biomass. There's more biomass of domestic birds than wild birds. More than twice as much biomass of domestic birds as wild birds. The other day my kid was asking me if there were more roly-polies or people. And I told him there are more roly polies or people and i told there are more roly polies i said there's more roly polies in your state than there are people on earth but then we got into like adjusting for size and i was explaining that as far as large mammals go there are far more people than any large mammal of comparable weight. And if you want to go with weight, if you take humans and our livestock and put us together, we outweigh the entire world of vertebrates except fish. There are more humans and livestock in terms of biomass than all other vertebrates except fish there are more humans and livestock in terms of biomass than all

other vertebrates if you put fish out of the equation because there's a there's a lot of weight in fish yeah and it's in the in water covers over 70 of our planet right so the paper talks about our contributions to species loss and biomass loss during the quaternary megafaunal extinction. We've got to back up from it. Yeah. Everything with a backbone on land. Everything with a backbone. That's not a fish.

That's not a fish. So this even counts marine mammals. Yes, it does. All the whales. Yep. The blue whale being the largest creature to ever exist on Earth. Check this out marine mammals if you want to go to marine mammals they have declined from 0.02 gigatons to 0.004 gigatons which is a five-fold loss in marine mammal biomass as a result of human exploitation. So this paper is really fascinating.

And in particular, the conversation about the change that this glorified primate that represents just a tiny little fraction of the global biomass has contributed to just shifting the distribution. So today, now the vast majority of biomass is woody vegetation, 550 gigatons of total carbon, 450 gigatons of that as plants but based on land use change it's estimated in the paper we have lost half the global biomass of plants so if you consider the the implications associated with our

our existence our growth and our ability to thrive on the planet, we've had, to put it very mildly, an outsized impact on the ecology of the earth. So I've been thinking about that paper. Okay. And then coupled with the taxi driver. Hold on for a minute. I promise I'm going to conclude shortly. Then there's this other paper that we'll also post about the changing attitudes people have towards natural resources. And this is a paper published by some researchers from Colorado State and Ohio State in biological conservation, the lead author is a guy named Michael Manfredo. And they talk about people who either have domination type values towards wildlife, and they also refer to these as more traditional values. So the idea that wildlife are here to benefit people,

this idea of the subservience of wildlife to human beings, as opposed to mutualist values, which are on the rise as we become more detached from the land increasingly urbanized these mutualist values which are along the lines of you know treating these other species in a way where we give them deference that's on the rise now that we've completely yeah the people who are most likely to live in a place where they've completely displaced wildlife exactly are mostly to be like you know what we should treat it all we should have mutual respect right now that we've vanquished it yes so they talk about this paper really focuses on how this this trend towards more mutualistic attitudes about wildlife is is already driving and will continue

to drive a lot of conflict around fish and wildlife management decisions. But in the paper, they also talk about this idea of being a pluralist, which is someone who feels like fish and wildlife can and should be used sustainably, but also that fish and wildlife warrant a high degree of reverence and appreciation and we need to figure out how to coexist with them that's called pluralism pluralist yeah so somebody sign me up dude totally i'm right there with you when they when this paper talks about pluralists i felt like that's hitting the mark and this is something we could talk a lot more about but in the interest of my concluding thought i had this paper about the changing distribution of biomass on the landscape on the on the planet the planetary landscape

coupled with this idea of a growing disconnect between our species and the systems in which we evolved in the systems that still still sustain us right? The flow of energy from the sun to our bodies. And having all that coupled with this idea that my driver shared last night of trying to navigate in a crowd without pushing. And I wonder if we as a species are capable of finding a way to operate where we thrive and we can extend this idea of not pushing to all of the non-human inhabitants of the planet we occupy yeah it's a good concluder i don't care if you did have that pre-thought up it warrants it that's what when i'm when i'm up at night laying there trying to fall asleep that's kind of stuff that's in my mind

and that's the kind of stuff that makes me feel supremely fortunate and privileged and grateful to be in this line of work. To be involved on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, with these tough kind of questions and conversations. You know, and whether we're talking about... Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that

because of raffle and sweepstakes law but hear this, On Axe Hunt is now in Canada It is now at your fingertips you canadians the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season now the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.